Saturday, March 14, 2009

Shaping the Day : A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300-1800 by Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift

Mechanical clocks have ruined our lives. In medieval Europe the first mechanical clocks appeared around 1270; they were not widely available until the 17th century, when an explosion in clock and watch ownership - the so-called horological revolution - changed for ever our perception of time. The remorseless ticking of those treasured timepieces transformed the way we worked, ushering in a new era of rigorous time-discipline and synchronised, soulless routine, almost totally obliterating the seasonal rhythms of a more humane, pre-industrial age. From that moment on we laboured under the tyranny of clock time.

The argument that clock time was the harbinger of industrialisation - enabling the creation of factory production lines and destroying the culture of working life in 18th-century England - was convincingly set out by the historian EP Thompson in his influential paper "Time, Work-discipline and Industrial Capitalism" (1968). But as Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift explain in this scrupulously researched study, Thompson was wrong.

Glennie and Thrift refuse to blame mechanical clocks for all the ills of the industrial age. The horological revolution was significant, they admit, but a working knowledge of clock time was a routine part of daily life for ordinary people long before industrialisation. Thompson, they say, seriously underestimates "the publicness of clock time" in late-medieval England, where public clocks loudly emitted their distinctive "time signals" or "soundmarks" throughout the day, telling people to go to work or school or market or church or to attend a public meeting. And at night the curfew bell (9pm in winter, 10pm in summer) told everyone to drink up and go home.

The earliest clocks were alarm clocks, designed to wake monks for nocturnal prayer. Medieval monks used water or mercury clocks at first, but many monasteries had mechanical clocks as early as the 13th century. The counting of hours in a monastery began at dawn, but although this time-discipline was all about God rather than money, it was as standardised and coordinated as in any factory.

Rural communities - so easily idealised - were just as disciplined. There were set times for harvesting, grazing, gleaning and moving livestock, as well as ancient bylaws and regulations using natural markers such as sunrise, noon, sunset and various subtle distinctions of daylight. There was also a well-established working week: 6am to 6pm, Tuesday to Saturday (Sunday and Monday were the weekend). Another Thompsonian myth busted by Glennie and Thrift is that clock time was a masculine preserve and women had little grasp of it. Women were just as clued up about time as men, generally getting up earlier and going to bed later.

This impressive volume is a massive undertaking - 12 years in the making - examining the entire "temporal infrastructure" of a broad historical period. Glennie and Thrift have delved into the archives, studying timekeeping in diaries, court and inquest records, ocean navigation and a host of other sources to gain a fuller understanding of what time meant to the pre-industrialised masses. Thompson deserves respect as a pioneer in his day, but the wealth of information uncovered by Glennie and Thrift makes his paper look narrow and presumptuous.

The underlying moral of this book would seem to be: don't patronise the past. We should never underestimate our forebears. As well as taking Thompson to task, the authors devote a whole chapter to showing how Dava Sobel, in Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, exaggerated the intellectual isolation of the clockmaker John Harrison, who played such a key role in chronometry. Harrison's Lincolnshire was not an almost clock-free environment, as Sobel suggests, and Harrison was in touch with a vast network of horological debate and discovery. The idea of the untrained outsider served Sobel's uses well, argue Glennie and Thrift, but at the risk of ruining a good story it is far from historically accurate.

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POETRY

Ian Pindar's second poetry collection Constellations (Carcanet) is out now. His debut collection Emporium (Carcanet) was shortlisted for The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection 2012. His poems have appeared in The English Review, The Forward Book of Poetry 2011 and 2012, London Magazine, Magma,New Poetries III, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Poetry Review, Stand, the Times Literary Supplement and Wave Composition. He won second prize in the National Poetry Competition 2009, a supplementary prize in the Bridport Prize 2010 and was shortlisted for the 2010 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem).

Praise for Constellations

‘The pleasure of Constellations lies in their lyrics’ easy movement among images and observations, their development less linear than cumulative . . . In such denser passages, where the observations leap from one to another in a momentum compelling both for the intriguing train of thought and for the music of the lines, Pindar achieves “a difficult // furthering; intense, informal immediacy” in his distinctive approach to the lyric.’Guardian

‘Pindar’s 88 brilliant new “constellations” are as haunting as they are enigmatic.’Marjorie Perloff, author of 21st-Century Modernism: The 'New' Poetics

Praise for Emporium

‘Pindar is urbane, funny and profound. A brilliant first collection.'Poetry London'There is real gold in this volume . . . I was about to say that Ian Pindar is a promising poet; but no, he is already a significant one.' Poetry Review

'Some of the most hyped poetry in Britain today has been ruthlessly pruned of any phrase that might ignite the slightest grin. Ian Pindar’s first collection, Emporium, is a welcome antidote. It’s dark, witty and entertaining . . . as ingenious as anything I've read for a while, and few collections have been half as entertaining.'Rob A Mackenzie, Magma‘Here's a poetry that's light, clear, at times almostthrowaway, full of political scope and menace.’ Guardian‘Pindar’s inventiveness and sense of linguistic andliterary history make this an enjoyable collection, holding promise for the future.’Boston Review‘It was about time for somebody to be channeling Eliot, maybe Stevens, Laforgue, and the Metaphysicals to such clashing effect: “bright as a seedsman’s packet”, with unexpected timbres and sonorities sabotaged by glockenspiel accents. Pindar is just right for the job.’John Ashbery

‘In this sparkling debut collection Ian Pindar brilliantly fulfils Verlaine’s injunction to the poet to take eloquence and wring its neck. Emporium offers the reader a beguiling and compendious range of styles and voices, and signals the arrival of a fascinating and original poet.’Mark Ford

‘Ian Pindar’s short, crisp and enjoyable new biography [is] an easy-going introduction to the man and a straightforward route into his work, aimed at people who know little about either.’Josh Lacey in the Guardian

‘Pindar manages gracefully to pack a wealth of information into this brief study.’Gerry Dukes in the Irish Independent

‘Pindar has skilfully made the process of understanding the complex relationship between Joyce’s life and work “funagain”.’Eric Bulson in The Times Literary Supplement